Alternatives to WotC Minis

[Nebt Bhakau]

Anyone ever play Heroquest or Battlemasters by Games Workshop / Milton Bradley? Those games had some great unpainted plastic minis. Orcs and goblins were green, guys in armor were grey, and undead were bone-white. I would kill for a bag of 50 or so hard-plastic minis like that.

 

[Davelozzi]

Anyone ever play Heroquest or Battlemasters by Games Workshop / Milton Bradley?

Well, I played Heroquest a couple of times, but I've had it for many years, and it's still around.
As a matter of fact, I just painted up a bunch of the skeleton minis that came with it and they came out great, much cooler than either of the WotC skeletons that I have (the Skeleton from HArbringer set, and the forward-leaning Warrior Skeleton from Archfiends).

 

[JVisgaitis]

I'm just wondering if it might be more a hassle for your company to diversify production between painted and unpainted, but maybe it's not a big issue at all.

I have contacts that could get me the metals without any problems. Its actually getting the prepainted plastics together that will be more of a hassle. I think that (prepainted plastics) would be a larger draw for this market though, so I prefer to go that route.

If you do the unpainted ones in metal, I guess then it definitely has a strong diversification, and you need to assemble two quite different production lines. It can be a hard effort, but perhaps you can later drop one of the two if the other turns out to be more profitable.

Someone else actually mentioned it here, I think that metals of the same minis wouldn't work as well. Its something I would try, but I honestly couldn't see it working in the long run. I'm pretty stubborn though, so I would probably try it out.

 

[DaveStebbins]

From what I remember, the set up cost for plastics is actually higher than metals, though you recover a lot from creating in bulk.

Yes, the mold cost for plastics tooling is much higher, but the high rate of production lowers the per-unit cost. The end effect is that the break-even point (the number of units where the cost of goods sold is covered by the sales dollars) is higher with plastic than metal. That's what makes the venture such a risk, the amount of up-front capital required is much higher.